‘Fine,’ replied Whisperer, in the same guttural language. ‘How do you intend to find the mortal, with such tight security around him?’
‘The nasty way. I’ll find someone in Odin’s employment and beat the living daylights out of him or her until they tell me where to go.’
At the airport Sam walked unsteadily across the car park, passing from one orange pool of light to another while overhead the planes pointed their noses to the sky and blasted upward.
‘You up to this?’ asked Whisperer.
‘You suggest I Waywalk in this condition?’ Sam asked, attempting a counterfeit humour. He’d taken off the blindfold, but Whisperer was concerned to see how his usually boyish smile was pained and how his eyes still burnt light grey. Were I human, this would be a friend, he thought with a sense of shock. Were I human, what I feel now would be loyalty. What an interesting concept.
‘Oh hell, the German accent,’ Sam exclaimed, fumbling in a pocket for his Sebastian Teufel passport. ‘And we’d better get the other passports out of the bag and into my pocket. At least I won’t be searched.’
‘I’ll be interested to see how you get that through customs.’ Whisperer indicated the sword slung once again over Sam’s back. ‘What if they want to put that through the machine?’
‘You just watch a master do his work.’
They walked to the Air France desk, where Sam attempted to speak French with a German accent as he handed over his passport for inspection, before claiming his single ticket to Moscow. If you have to start searching for Andrew anywhere, let it be the centre. Sam was still blinking painfully and his voice was laden with fatigue. Observing his condition Whisperer said, ‘Try humming. That’ll shut out the sounds in your head.’
Sam began humming ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’, out of tune and with no real conviction, but the frown uncreased slightly between his brows, and his grey eyes continued to darken.
At the boarding gate he took Whisperer’s hand. ‘Thank you for everything you’ve done.’
‘See you in Moscow,’ replied Whisperer. ‘Just as soon as I find a Fey Portal.’
Only spirits used Fey Portals. Whether it was the same principle as Waywalking, Sam couldn’t tell.
He said, ‘Watch your back.’
‘I always do. Aren’t I the one who gets lost in the fog?’
‘Of course. I hope Adamarus is as good as you at losing followers, being the blown end of the network.’
‘It’s hard to track through a Feywalk.’
The queue moved a little further towards the metal detector and customs, and Sam touched a finger to his lips, a little of his old humour returning. ‘Now why don’t you watch Satan weave his magic? You may be able to use it yourself.’
Whisperer laughed. ‘Mortal minds are no one’s domain but yours.’
He knew as soon as the words were out how misjudged they were, considering the torrent of voices Sam was still receiving in his fragile state. Sam however made nothing of them beyond a gesture of acknowledgement. He turned and walked towards the gate, his face assuming the empty look of every commuter catching a late flight.
‘If you wouldn’t mind putting your bags through the machine, sir. And if you could remove all metal objects.’
Sam unslung his luggage and laid it on the machine. He emptied some loose change from his pocket, and without a qualm he stepped through the metal detector. The dagger failed completely to alert the machine.
A security officer was staring intently at the screen as Sam’s bag, containing both sword and crown, began to pass through the machine. Indeed, thought Whisperer, watching from a distance, he was staring so intently it was a wonder his eyes didn’t pop out.
Suddenly the man sneezed, then sneezed again, huge explosions that shook his whole body. Tears sprang to his eyes and he groped blindly for a packet of tissues before blowing his nose with the sound of a volcano in full eruption. In the meantime Sam’s bags had passed through the system without provoking a peep. He retrieved them without glancing back at Whisperer, the magician who has carried off a perfect trick. The only clue that he was even slightly different from the other travellers was a smug gleam in the corner of his still-darkening eyes.
He was like that, thought Whisperer. You brace yourself for a huge performance involving fireworks, and the minds of mortals being re-written in bursts of concentrated magic, and all Sam does is tickle the man’s nose.
Sam Linnfer, Luc Satise, Sebastian Teufel, Lucifer, Satan, the evil one – whatever you wished to call him, as he himself would say – stepped on to international territory towards an uncertain truth locked in the mind of a mortal.
No one disturbed him on the plane. He appeared to be asleep, with the blindfold over his eyes and his headphones playing whatever in-flight music channel he’d first found. Apart from the occasional yowl of a child, the whole plane was silenced by sleep. It was the kind of silence in which the hum of the engines became more pronounced, along with the odd shudder whenever they encountered turbulence.
But Sam wasn’t sleeping. How could he, when his eyes burned so and the whispers of numberless other minds still filled his head? Which was why he was listening to the in-flight entertainment – endless songs about the trauma of breaking up, played, probably, by people with the same hairstyles. At least it shut out some of the voices.
He’d nearly lost control; that was what shocked him most. He’d come so close to losing what little power he held over… it. That buried curse, written into blood and bone in lines of fire and left to haunt him for the rest of his days. And he’d nearly let it loose.
‘When you release it, does it hurt?’
Annette speaking. He glanced up from his study of the map, surprised by her question. In this deep, cold cellar full of old wine bottles and spider’s webs, they’d been discussing the local Resistance’s plan for sabotaging a military plant. Her query had come from nowhere. At twenty-six, Annette was a woman made wise by war. From a spring evening in pre-war Paris this bourgeoise, who’d thought the whole world was made up of cocktail parties, had lost a husband, had learnt to parachute and kill with her bare hands, and, in her own quaint way, had sold her soul to Satan.
But, as Sam often said, she hadn’t made him an offer. She’d just thrust her soul upon him.
‘Does what hurt?’ he asked, annoyed at being taken out of his train of thought.
‘The Light. When you release it. Does it hurt?’
He went on looking at the map, but no longer seeing it clearly. ‘Sometimes more than others. It depends how far it goes. Usually the after-effects hurt more than the actual release.’
‘It seems strange.’
‘What does?’
‘Well…’ she gestured vaguely. ‘You’re the Devil. Surely you should release pure darkness or something?’
‘Define “pure darkness”.’
‘Oh, come on!’
‘No, seriously. What effect would pure darkness have on the world, were it released?’
She looked uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know. Kill everything, I guess.’
‘And what’s the effect of the so-called “Light” in me?’
She didn’t answer his question. ‘‘Lucifer… Luc…’
‘It burns. It blinds. It consumes its vessel and opens the souls of men, removes every stitch of human privacy and bares the darkest, deepest thoughts of mortal minds, makes them sing their lies and their selfish plans to him who hears. It only makes the lies and the hatred sing, though. It opens none of the goodness in the heart. Subjected thus, is it really so surprising that the Devil should possess it?’
‘I guess not,’ she’d replied. Sam, for a few brief seconds, had been his age, twice his age, when talking of the Light within. It always unsettled her, to be reminded that she would grow old and die, but that this man before her would stay as he was now. The Bearer of Light. The eternal shadow that haunts sinners. Her Luc Satise. Yet no one’s Luc.
Annette had also asked him once, ‘Why are
you Sam?’
He’d been surprised – it had taken her until 1969 to put this question. Perhaps she’d only now mustered the recklessness to delve into something she’d vowed to keep out of in 1941.
Already there was a streak of premature grey in her hair, though he’d been too polite to mention it.
‘I know it, you know. You think I’m getting old.’
He opened his mouth to say something along the line of, ‘No, of course not’ – and saw her expression. ‘Oh.’
‘“Oh?” What does “oh?” mean?’
‘Just “oh?” As in… no matter what I really think, I’ve never once won an argument against you.’
‘Do you still drink coffee?’
‘My tastes are liable to all sorts of change. Two thousand years ago I ate dormice with the rest of Rome.’
‘I never believed they ate those.’
‘You wouldn’t believe a lot of the things they got up to in Rome. Civilisation leads to boredom, and boredom leads to anarchism, but in a very civilised way.’
‘And I imagined you’d remind me of my youth. You sound older than I look.’
‘There might be a reason for that,’ he pointed out mildly.
She smiled faintly, turning her head to one side. ‘You’ve met my husband?’
‘The man outside weeding the garden?’
‘Yes. This is his house. That’s his grandfather on the wall, that’s his sofa, that’s his whisky cabinet.’
‘Ah.’ The man Sam had seen outside looked like a character out of Charles Dickens – complete with fob watch, whiskers and quite possibly a top hat in some wardrobe upstairs in the grand mansion that Annette was currently calling her home. The 1960s seemed to have passed by this rural English village without anyone being aware of what they were missing. Except Annette, of course.
‘He was in the war.’
‘Ah. What did he do?’
‘A navy captain.’
‘Wow. I’d never have thought that…’
‘Stationed in the Caribbean.’
‘Oh. Well, I mean…’
‘Luc, stop stuttering.’ She stared at him. Then she burst out laughing.
‘What?’
‘I can’t believe I’m chiding a man thousands of years older than I am, in my motherly voice.’
‘I’m used to it. “Do you know how old I am, young man?” – “Who, me? I’m just walking down the street here.” – “Yes, you! When I was young, men were different! What’s your name?… Sam? What kind of name is that?”’
‘Well? What kind of name is it?’
‘Sam. Derivative of Satan.’
‘And Luc derives from Lucifer?’
‘Which one do you prefer?’
He shrugged. ‘Lucifer is the name I was given at birth. Satan is what they dubbed me, when they found out what my real name meant. Bearer of Light is hardly a friendly way to describe the soul of darkness, evil incarnate, the great deceiver.’ He spoke bitterly, his mind cast back to things he’d tried to forget.
‘But what do you prefer, of your human names?’
‘None. They’re necessary, that’s all. Luc reminds me of what I truly am. Sam reminds me of the disdain of my own brothers and sisters – who threw me out of Heaven for being what I am. The bastard son. The necessary one, where all of them were clearly not necessary. And though Time passed bitter judgement on me, still he gave me a crown. Still they think he favoured me.’
‘And of course, you tempted Adam from the Garden of Eden.’
At this he openly laughed, making Annette blush. Whenever Sam laughed for no reason she felt a pang of insufficiency. Who knows what he’s seen in his life? I am a child in his hands.
‘Do you really believe that?’ he demanded. ‘Surely you of all people don’t believe in the Garden?’
‘Well, what was it you were banished for?’
‘I was banished for following my conscience, and you people should all damn well thank me for it!’
‘Why?’
‘I saved Adam. Not that his name was Adam. There was a host of them, anyway. Ready to die for their various interesting deities, so that a group of self-important Waywalkers could fulfil their misguided dream and step to the place above Heaven. It was a pathetic, brutal, stupid experiment and I’ – he gave a mock bow – ‘was Castro to their Baptista.’
‘Above Heaven?’
‘Eden,’ he explained softly. ‘The realm of the greatest, warmest Powers. Powers that make Time look rather vulgar. Eden.’
‘And you stopped them? Why?’
‘Because,’ he explained, still smiling, ‘if my mad brothers had gone through with their scheme to get into Eden, not only would your precious Adam and Eve have perished, but humankind wouldn’t have lasted long enough to invent the wheel.’
But it wasn’t just following your conscience, was it? thought Sam sourly of himself. I was trying to prove something. I was trying to free myself of something, and I thought that by doing what I did it would be enough. What a fool I was.
‘This is your captain speaking. We will be arriving in Moscow in one hour’s time.’
‘Tell me about your father.’
Again, later. When the 1960s were well and truly over and the 1980s were trying to pretend they weren’t as systems-built as they seemed.
‘What’s there to tell?’
Annette had shrugged. ‘How can Time be King of Heaven?’
‘How can he not be? Time conquers all, Time is the inescapable fate, everywhere, everywhen. Time knows how the universe will end, sees his own demise. Yours. Mine. And does nothing, save keep the clocks ticking.’
In Heaven, the Room of Clocks. A room that roars with ticking. The walls, the ceiling, the huge floor are covered with clocks, sundials, hourglasses, candles of every kind… When these clocks stop, Time will be dead. When they begin to run anticlockwise —
‘What would happen, if your father ever died?’
‘Ah. Now you’re talking about Cronus.’
When they begin to run anticlockwise, Cronus will be king. And when they stop altogether, it’s because we’ve all been compressed down to a single point of existence. Not alive, not dead, just there. Inside Cronus. For ever.
He reached across and took her hand in his, something she’d demanded increasingly during the rough period after divorcing her third husband; her hair was now entirely grey. ‘Feel my pulse?’ he asked, gently pressing her fingers against his wrist.
‘Yes.’
‘That’s a sign of life. With every heartbeat I drain the existence of Time a little further, stealing a few more seconds off his life. But everyone does that, and Time’s life is a thousand, million, billion times greater than the universe. But if Cronus usurped Time, there would be no pulse. Where we feed on Time’s life, where my pulse keeps perfect rhythm with my father’s, Cronus feeds on our life. He will let us be reduced to the tiniest thought, but he will keep us there, taking our thoughts and our souls, which will still produce the smallest spark, until the universe is just one factory for his desires. Cronus is the only creature in the universe who doesn’t feed on Time, but on that part of the universe that’s timeless. He is not-life, not-death, he is a very, very simplistic way of existence, compressed down to a single point and going nowhere, never changing.’ He shrugged. ‘Timeless.’
‘Like what? What is there that is timeless?’ she asked scornfully. ‘You’re always going on about how Time controls everything.’
‘Not everything. There are things that are frozen outside Time’s reach. Concepts are timeless. Human hate a thousand years ago is the same as human hate today. The same applies to love. The same to compassion. The same to envy. Memories are timeless – you either have them, or you don’t. Cronus feeds on those memories, until their owners are reduced to nothing. Cronus feeds on those concepts, until all that remains is the bare bones of anyone who feels those things. Where Time gives life and the future, Cronus takes souls and the past, freezing everything in place, insi
de himself. There would be no death, under Cronus. But there would be no life either.’
She sat still for a long time, feeling his pulse in her hand. ‘You say Time is everywhere, in the future, in the past. It’s all the same to him.’
‘Yes.’
‘Then he saw that war would come?’
‘Yes. He’s seen every war, and every man who dies in it.’
Waywalkers: Number 1 in Series Page 12